Russia's 'Snowboard Rubles' Hit The Slopes

The new 100-ruble banknote with the 2014 Olympic theme being introduced in St. Petersburg recently.

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Russia's 'Snowboard Rubles' Hit The Slopes

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Russians recently got their first look at 100-ruble notes celebrating the country's first chance to host the Olympics since the Moscow Summer Games in 1980.

They were rolled out 100 days ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, which will run from February 7-23 in and around the Russian Black Sea resort.

The 20 million Sochi-themed banknotes planned for circulation depict an airborne snowboarder executing an exuberant "grab" high above a handful of venues and against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains. The other side shows Fisht Olympic Stadium, the venue for the opening and closing ceremonies.

Its "vertical composition is in line with modern trends in banknote design and helps to express the uniqueness of the region, where snowy mountains and the warm sea live side by side," say Sochi organizers.

It looks to me like a male snowboarder, despite the fact that Russian snowboarding's only Olympic medalist so far is Yekaterina Ilyukhina, who sped her way to a silver medal in Vancouver in the parallel giant slalom event.

The banknote is already getting its first taste of competition, too. It's been nominated alongside eight other banknotes, including Libya's 50-dinar denomination and the celebrated Kazakh tenge, for the International Bank Note Society's "Banknote of 2013" competition (a nomination takes just one member, apparently -- in this case, thank you, Steven Bron!).

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Written by RFE/RL editors and correspondents, Transmission serves up news, comment, and the odd silly dictator story. While our primary concern is with foreign policy, Transmission is also a place for the ideas -- some serious, some irreverent -- that bubble up from our bureaus. The name recognizes RFE/RL's role as a surrogate broadcaster to places without free media. You can write us attransmission+rferl.org